Stargazing LIVE with BBC Learning

Accompanying 2014’s Stargazing LIVE were a series of national events hosted by BBC Learning. The events were designed to inspire both amateurs and experts and were staged with efforts to reduce their overall environmental impact.

Events, especially those staged in the dark, require power to run lights and AV equipment – but diesel generators are certainly not the only option. The team behind Stargazing managed to plug into grid power at a number of locations, eliminating the need to generate their own altogether.

In Portsmouth, where grid power wasn’t possible, they used a carbon neutral waste vegetable oil generator which produced the required power without the associated carbon footprint from the combustion of mineral based diesel.
The team used 175 litres of bio-diesel on site at Portsmouth (which as a waste production does not carry a carbon footprint), should the generator have been powered using red diesel this would have produced 500 kg of carbon dioxide.